Have you ever wondered what Barbie would be thinking if she had a brain? Apparently, Denise Duhamel has done quite a bit of ruminating on the world's most well-known doll. The result of her focus on Barbie is this incredibly inventive (and often disturbing) collection of 43 poems, Kinky.
Duhamel's Barbie poems started out as a chapbook called It's My Body. Her reading of these poems in 1992 at American University in Washington, DC, was attended by Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersol, who went on to publish Mondo Barbie. That collection of poems and stories about Barbie included a great many works by famous names in the literary community Julia Alvarez, Lyn Lifshin, Alice McDermott, Gary Soto, and of course, Duhamel herself. Writers and artists can't get enough of this icon. In August 2001, a Utah artist won his free-speech case against Mattel, which was suing him for his depictions of Barbie in explicit poses.
Kinky is Duhamel's fifth book of poetry, and while many poets may have written on the subject of Barbie, few have done so as prolifically as Duhamel. I am reluctant to say that there is a feminist edge to these poems, for fear of predisposing readers to pigeonhole this as a solely feminist work, which it is not. What Duhamel does in Kinky is turn our conception of Barbie on its hollow plastic head. I admire Duhamel's determination to really challenge Barbie's image in these poems giving her unsavory qualities. For example, in "Barbie as Mafiosa":
When she's slipped the bag of cocaine,
Barbie ducks into her favorite alley.
She pulls her head off and fills herself up
as though she's as innocent as a shapely salt shaker.
Duhamel's words burst off their pages in some of these poems, especially the ones in which Duhamel explores the ethnic variations of Barbie that have been introduced in the marketplace over the years. These poems are highly charged social statements. For example, "Native American Barbie" is simply one line There's only one of her left. And these lines from "Black Barbie History":
Today, the same plastic surgery
used on Black Barbie can smooth those ethnic features
in all of us. We can all look the same, as we jump
into a vat of anesthesia and knives. So let's
bring our check books, our intolerable foibles, our fat selves.
There'll be no more competition when we emerge, identical
and redone, only dulled sisterhood and numbed love.
While there is this healthy dose of social commentary in Kinky, Duhamel does manage to have a lot of fun with her subject. Many of the poems have a delightfully playful appeal. As examples, "Why Barbie and Ken Don't Dress in Underwear" is dedicated to Sharon Stone, and poor "Beatnik Barbie":
couldn't snap.
Her fingers, Venetian blinds
that refused to spread
Duhamel speculates there is also a dark side to the way that Barbie is viewed by others. The poem "Barbie's Molester" is a disturbing portrait that demonstrates the dangerous juxtaposition of childhood with such a highly eroticized doll. It's not surprising, then, that we find poems in this collection titled "Barbie in Therapy" and "Barbie Joins a Twelve-Step Program," as Duhamel explores issues of sexuality, body-consciousness and helplessness that women (and young girls) face.
It seems that as long as Barbie populates the shelves of toy stores around the world, she will evoke emotions and ideas obvious or subliminal for generations to come. And writers and artists will not leave her alone. Duhamel took the lead in bringing these emotions and ideas so prominently into poetry, and I am glad that she dared give voice to these important subjects.
